The Customer is Always Right?

The Customer is always right. How many times have we heard that? You know that can’t possibly be true. The Customer can’t ALWAYS be right can they?

When I was in training for this franchise I asked the director of marketing why he had got out of his store. He had been an owner previously. He said it was the customers. Customers can be difficult, but it is rare. Out of the 1,000 customers we have each month 1 is the devil. So I like to look at it positively. 1 out of 1,000 is not bad.

The goal is to make money. In order to make money we have to have customers. Yes I am my own boss, but now I have a thousand supervisors making sure I do a good enough job. The best way to attract customers is through current customers. Current customers will be the best advocates of my business if they like coming to the store. They want value and they want to feel good. Not everyone is our customer. Some people who are not our customers come into our shop. We don’t have to treat them well. But they are in disguise sometimes AND they may meet some of our customers outside of the store. So just to be safe it is better to treat everyone as if they were our customer.

One example of someone who is not our customer is someone who thinks we should not charge extra for stamps. We buy stamps from the post office. We pay the same price that everyone else does. We do not get a discount. In fact we order stamps online (just like everyone else can) and the United States Postal Service charges us money for shipping. So we actually pay MORE for our stamps. (Interesting side note we get charged shipping for stamps that we pay money for, but nothing for boxes for which we do not pay for and which are heavier. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I am not running their business). We have had people come in wanting to buy stamps. One lady came in and when she found out that we charge 60 cents (after paying 49 cents) she was angry. She said she was going to report us. We always wonder how to handle a customer like that. Pride says we should make them realize how stupid they are. Our goal is to make people feel good about coming into our store. We try to reply that we wish we could sell them for less, but we can’t. We apologize and give them options for purchasing their stamps across the street at the grocery store or to go to the post office. It is hard, but swallowing our pride is a good thing. I don’t need the approval of people generally but specifically people who are not my customers. They do not make me feel better or worse about myself regardless of what they say.

People don’t know our business. They don’t know how we make money. They may think they have an idea about how it works, but they don’t know. I barely have an idea of how it works and I think about it all the time. Someone who just walks in wanting to buy something doesn’t stand a chance to understand it all.

I had a customer call and want to rent a U-haul truck. When she found out how much it was going to cost her she was stunned. She was sure that there was something wrong with us. “That price is not right” She would say. I don’t know how she came to that conclusion. She expected our price to be $20 or something like that. When our price did not meet her expectations the problem was us. “How can you stay in business charging that much?” It is not this simple, but if we have more customers than trucks then we might not be charging enough.

People do not know shipping. Amazon has taught them it should be free. Obviously shipping is not free, not even for Amazon. This also will cause people to be surprised when their expectations are not aligned with our need to make money.

I was looking at another business to purchase and one of the things I looked at was their yelp review. The customer gave them a bad review. Their main complaint was that they did not like their prices. How does that deserve a bad review. He even tried to show the math and how they were obviously not charging the right amount. It is amazing that customers think they KNOW what the price should be and anything else is a problem with the person setting the price.

One of my favorite stories is about a customer who came in looking to send a fax. He asked what we charged. I said $1.50 per page. He said that it was too much. His friend charges only $1 per page. I said, “Well then I would definitely send your faxes there” This is not our customer. I want them to feel smart. He said, “He keeps messing it up” Now in his mind his friend was charging the right amount and I was the bad guy. Amazing.

We will not discount or put items on sale. It trains the customers to expect things to be on sale. When Christmas is over we put everything away. We will try to give people options that will save them money. For example people often come in with Post Office Flat Rate boxes. We will offer to see if it would be cheaper to send in a padded envelope instead. Or they may ask to send something via FedEx and we will tell them it would be less expensive to use UPS. Those are customer wins.

The one exception we make in discounting is in shipping International. We discount FedEx and DHL to try and encourage customers to use those services. A $400 package to Israel via DHL would be $275 to send it through the post office, but $650 to send it using DHL published rates. We do not want people to use the post office for anything, but especially International packages. Customers don’t realize how much we are discounting, but we will tell them we discount the service to encourage them to not use the post office. A lot still will because they are so much cheaper.

So here are my top 10  customer axioms.

  1. Customers want the prices to meet their unpredictable expectations
  2. Customers care very much that they are getting better pricing than others
    1. There is no relationship between their price and our cost
  3. Customers like exceptional service but do not value the cost of delivering service.
    1. Customers do not calculate the cost of delivering a service when setting their expectation
  4. Customers understand that we need to make a profit.
  5. Customers like it when we don’t make a profit off of them
  6. Customers like discounts
    1. Customers should not be trained to expect discounts
  7. Customers like saving money
  8. Customers save money when they pay less than their expectations
  9. Rarely will customers appreciate being told where they can get your products for less
    1. Their expectation is that if someone else can charge less you should too.
  10. Customers who complain about spending a penny more than expected will complain about a dollar more than expectation. Might as well charge a dollar more.

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